Drugs for Profit, the Same for Care

Public Citzenpetitioned FDA Commissioner to immediately removal from market Pfizer's Alzheimer's drug, Aricept 23 mg dose, because of serious safety hazards and failure to demonstrate efficacy. The petition also urges FDA to add a label warning on Aricept and generic donepezil (5 mg and 10 mg) stating: "Use of 20 mg per day is counter indicated."

Aricept (donepezil) 23 mg was approved July 23, 2010 on the basis of a single clinical trial (Study 326) --despite the recommendation by both FDA medical reviewers and statistical reviewers NOT to approve the drug because it had failed to demonstrate efficacy but significantly increased risks to patient safety.

Patients in the trial had already been taking Aricept 10 mg for three months. They were randomized to Aricept at either 10 mg dose or 23 mg. Complete article

UPDATE: 3 February 2010 In the brain of his low dose test animals, Isaacson observed a tangling of capillary blood vessels, reduced oxy... Vitamins for Alzheimer's. September 2010 Good News for B Vitamins and Your Brain Ranks now in the ...

Vitamins for Alzheimer's. September 2010 Good News for B Vitamins and Your Brain Ranks now in the TOP10 out of 3.9 M Access the May 2007 issue of herbalYODA Says! that focuses on vitamin B12 with a donation to help us continue this work ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., May 19 (UPI) -- End-of-life hospice care is being dominated by investor-owned chains that cherry-pick patients and cut labor costs to maximize profits, U.S. researchers say.Dr. Robert Stone, an emergency medicine physician in Bloomington, Ind., and Joshua Perry of Indiana University say end-of-life hospice care was once the province of charitable organizations, but 52 percent of hospices are now part of the for-profit sector.For-profit hospice industry grew by 128 percent from 2001 to 2008, while the non-profit sector grew by only 1 percent. During the same period, government-sponsored hospices increased by 25 percent."Research shows that for-profit hospices, and especially publicly traded chain providers, generate higher revenues than their non-profit counterparts," Stone says in a statement. "They do this in part, studies show, by selectively recruiting longer-term patients, most of whom do not have cancer, thereby gaming the Medicare payment system." Complete Article

Dying hospice patients have been denied morphine in their final hours because a doctor couldn't be reached in the middle of the night, nurses told The Associated Press. Massachusetts, the model for the federal health care overhaul,

This item is important to me in relation to a recent case of the demise of a person with ALS in N. Idaho, through the hospice system. Dr. Hawking is renown as one of the great minds of our times, and yet with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease)

I received this article from Hospice Patient's Alliance. If people contemplate and really see the sanctity of life, their "quality of life" arguments fall away and they will understand that we are here to care for each other, ...